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Stadium refinancing idea

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Hope not! If they can't finance the club they should just try and sell it when we're in the Championship. I bet they can get their money back after all the Netflix publicity, maybe even getting some profit.
 

oddbod said:
How is the ground worth 80 million?

Hold on fella i thought donald and santi had enough dosh to finance us up the league towards the premiership .....sounds like they want to increase their portfolio by using the clubs assets ...some rethinking needs to be done here me thinks!
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It's about long term self sustainability. Not Stewart Donald and Sartori ploughing in money Ellis Short style.
 
Windypants said:
Dunno. I think, but, I'm not certain, that the new owners owe Short £40M, rather than them paying £40M. I was under the impression that the parachute payments would cover this, with club assets as security.
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So they hit it for nowt? Canny deal, especially if they can get £40m secured on an asset.
 
West_Winger said:
Exactly this.

If they’re talking about selling off part of our assets to finance the team that doesn’t inspire much confidence in me.

It took Leeds nearly 13 years to take back ownership of Elland Road after they had to sell up. The whole point of them buying Sunderland in the first place was that we owned our ground and we owned the academy.

This makes me feel uncomfortable tbh. Imagine if Short had come out and said this - we’d be up in arms.
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To be fair I'd be up in arms if he said he couldn't finance a promotion push from the championship so was going to raise £40m by refinancing the stadium and plough it into a transfer fund. That would be serious alarm bells because knowing us the players would do shit, we'd not go up, we'd lose money on them all and suddenly we'd be left in debt. Thankfully what he's considering is very different. If (and I don't know enough about business to assess the likelihood of success) there is a way of utilising the asset to bring us a steady, relatively guaranteed income stream, it sounds sensible.

Glad they're at least thinking of things like this. We all want to be in the PL, and we want to be challenging there (not saying Europe, but fair to say we all strive for more than constantly battling relegation). To do that we'll need to come up with new revenue streams. We have a lot of fans but, due to fair ticket prices, it doesn't relate to higher gate receipts than many clubs with considerably smaller crowds. In the PL at least there's the tv money I suppose, but certainly to finance getting into it in the first place we'll need to be a bit creative

Jorrd93 said:
Seems to be a lot of people in here that think they know more about running businesses than a multi millionaire business man.

Not surprised like.
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Not seen many like that tbh, certainly no "he doesn't know what he's talking about, this is what he should be doing" posts. Just people discussing something from a podcast; thankfully you don't need to be an expert to have an opinion on a message board, if you did this place would be very, very quiet. We all give our opinions on professional footballers without being experts, this is no different
 
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Completely sensible idea imho.

If you can pay for the cost of the finance then all you’re doing is increasing revenue streams. Even if they only made a small profit on top of the financing costs, once the initial loan is paid back, the profits increase, and the club bring more money in overall. Surely this would be a good thing in terms of ffp etc?

He’s talking about very long term investment, and using the stadium to kick start things as an example.

The hotel idea was purely an example. I’m sure if he knew of a hotel he could get for 10mil that gave him 2.5mil back each year profit, he would’ve done that already

FWIW, I would’ve thought that bringing a lot of our operations “in house” would be a decent long term investment idea. The catering for example, rather than allowing a company to pay us to run it, run it ourselves. There must be profit in there for the catering company, otherwise why would they do it. I assume we do this to minimise variance while taking some guaranteed money upfront?
 
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Don't the Guardian newspaper do something like this? Invest in other businesses and any profit generated goes back into the loss-making paper. A football club is unlikely to run at a profit so seems a clever idea to me.
 
Sounds terrible to me, loans are effectively an attempt to speed up time. This may be beneficial to the owners in the was of a sale but it is my hope that we would effectively plan long term.
 
Ale taster said:
Just listened to Mr Donald's podcast for the second time and his idea (which is just that at this stage and may come to nothing) of securing £40m of borrowing against half the value of the ground to buy, for example, four hotels at £10m each that would each generate £2.5m per annum to be ploughed straight back into the team to help us compete against other clubs parachute payments in the Championship.
I think this makes perfect sense if done prudently which I trust SD would, but it does expose our ground to an element of risk.
What do the financial savvy think ?
@Grumpy Old Man etc. etc.
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Smart thinking property hotels if bought in the right areas could make the club a lot of money but a wrong move like any investment could be dangerous....
 
Coeus said:
Sounds terrible to me, loans are effectively an attempt to speed up time. This may be beneficial to the owners in the was of a sale but it is my hope that we would effectively plan long term.
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This is a long term plan mate. Making the club self sufficient and generating new streams of revenue to set the club up for years and allow it to grow.

I'm pleased they're thinking along these lines and this was just one of many ideas. Hopefully they choose the right one(s) and bring some success.
 
jsdftm04 said:
It's concerning that we are talking 10s of millions loans to be able to compete in the championship.

SD didnt sound exactly confident of it
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I agree.

Under Bob Murray the criticism was he ran it as an accountant in a time when most clubs were hitting huge debts.

At that point we were a premier league/championship yo yo club.

So I personally find it a bit worrying we are now a league 1 / championship yo yo club.
 
johnnyat87 said:
This is a long term plan mate. Making the club self sufficient and generating new streams of revenue to set the club up for years and allow it to grow.

I'm pleased they're thinking along these lines and this was just one of many ideas. Hopefully they choose the right one(s) and bring some success.
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Loaning money isn't a revenue stream imo and quite frankly I don't have the utmost faith in the scouting department.

Just my opinion but it isn't something I would endorse what so ever.
 
Windypants said:
Dunno. I think, but, I'm not certain, that the new owners owe Short £40M, rather than them paying £40M. I was under the impression that the parachute payments would cover this, with club assets as security.
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Pretty sure they are a long way down the road to paying Ellis Short off IIRC. Something one of either Charlie Met or Stewart Donald said a bit ago

Might have that wrong mind. If so there are a few on here that know enough to put it better

But in any event, absent two successive promotions which would be a miracle really, we have to live without the parachute payments soon anyway, and that is the position they seek to have the club in by the end of next season.

It's all a long road, but at least now we know we are going in the right direction. Ten months ago we were falling into a bottomless pit of debt and disaster.
 
JJH said:
Sounds a good idea but in the real world maybe not .
£10m a hotel would not get you much and it certainly wouldn’t make you £2.5 a year.
Maybe a better chance of building one for £40m in the right location .
I would rather he didn’t risk the stadium
Surprised Bob Murray didn’t have it written in blood when he sold up.
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The Hilton was £12m mate.
 
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